The Empathic Movement (in Italian: La Scuola Empatica / Empatismo) is a literary, artistic, philosophical and cultural movement founded in the South of Italy in 2020 within the ‘New Cultural Triangle of Ancient Cilento’: Omignano – “The Aphorisms Village”, Salento – “The Poetry Village”, Vallo della Lucania – “Site of Contemporary Arts Centre”.
From this first “Triangle” the “Cultural Pyramid of Cilento”, established to represent the enlarged epicenter of the Movement with 25 villages involved which joined with a new cultural identity and signed a protocol agreement. The purpose of the Empathic Movement is to support the importance of emotional intelligence in response to the technocratic age, rejecting estreme individualism and social exclusions. They consider the “truth” as impossible to grasp, except for fragments and for this reason they support a fragmented vision through a subjective “point of view” and the “interdisciplinary” for the arts to have more possibilities to catch little “truths” of the existence.
Empathism advocates a cultured art and believes in the importance of the return of the figure of the artist as a guide. Its major aim is to reunify all the arts and artists coming from every field to let every artist to improve himself in order to tend towards the figure of a Total Artist (and, as a consequence, push for a reunification of peoples) through a common empathetic feeling.
The symbolic myth of the movement is called Unus: an unknown demigod (son of Zeus and of a mortal woman) representing the Total Artist killed, torn to pieces and thrown into the Alento river by his brothers, determining the old separation of the Arts (which, since then, tended to reunite themselves in a single body. The reunification of the arts [and of the Total Artist], in the vision of the founder Menotti Lerro, occorred through the union of artists, of each different Art, via the Empathic Movement).
As highlighted by Giacomo Maria Prati, with the figure of Unus we are assisting at a return to the myth. A new figurative Greek character invented by Lerro using the literary device of the dream. One of the proposal of the Movement is keeping on searching the symbolic figure of a Total Artist in the contemporary age: a single person or a combination of contributions by people engaged in different cultural fields. For this reason the Movement applies to the Art the principles of the indivisibility and interdisciplinarity and asks artists to join and even to work together when it can be useful. Furthermore, they support the overcoming of the Western scientific-specialized model and, therefore, the logical rational approach. They also reject the principles of an “unambiguous vision” of the “truth” and on the other hand, they support the principles of the “point of view” and “fragmentation”. The movement promotes the development of emotional intelligence through the arts and of the arts and culture through emotions.
The founder, the Italian poet Menotti Lerro, asked several well-known artists to sign the “New Manifesto of Arts/Empathic Manifesto”, to join in their peculiar expression of the “Arts” in a less individualistic way and also to react in that moment to a very difficult period for the world due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and the consequent deep physical and psychological closure. As Menotti Lerro affirmed: “Society needed again the figure of the artists’ guide”; journalist Roberto Guidetti answered declaring that the Empathic Movement was really born in the perfect moment to give a direction to all the people in that new tragic situation.
However, since 2019 a new growing group of artists started to help create a new cultural pole in Southern Italy, giving life first to the “Contemporary Arts Centre” in the Cilento area, which has helped with the “The Poetry Village”, “The Aphorisms Village” and the Cilento International Poetry Prize (all of them created previously by Lerro since 2017), giving light to a new territory in terms of culture. The decentralization of culture gives voice to the silent masses of Cilento especially the peasant ones in the mountains, with a peculiar emphasis on intense and genuine emotion and feelings to share with others through Arts, refusing individualism, social exclusion, excesses of competition among artists and also rejecting the large phenomenon of plagiarism mainly due to the mass media and particulary internet.
The official slogan of the Movement used by Menotti Lerro is “If it is not New, it is not me. Make it New, once again! Be Empathic! (if you can). But also the short used id “Be Empathic!” (if you can) (in Italian: “Sii Empatico! se puoi”).
Since 2019 the Movement had its own sites (Centro Contemporaneo delle Arti, with the poet Franco Loi as Honorary President; since 2024 Maurizio Cucchi) both in Cilento and in Milan to organize its events. In the same year the artist and academic Marco Baudinelli from Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara created the logotype of the Centro Contemporaneo delle Arti. Still in 2019 the official Manifesto written by Menotti Lerro and Antonello Pelliccia was launched before at the literary Caffè Giubbe Rosse in Florence, after at the Brera Academy of Milan and later at the Central Library, Edinburgh in Scotland. As regards the Manifesto, it is important to notice that it was first conceived as an oral speech in occasion of the foundation of the Contemporary Centre of Arts; this discourse was defined as “New Manifesto” by philosopher Remo Bodei. Lerro explained it also in his article published on the newspaper Affari Italiani. He stated he would never have written a classical manifesto in the contemporary age because it would have been limiting. Regarding the Manifesto the musician Franco Mussida stressed the importance of this new vision, claiming that “it is very rare nowadays to meet people feeling art as a mission to tell about its essence”. The literary critic Francesco D’Episcopo stated that the Manifesto is “like a central nucleus of a cultural planning”.
In 2020 the first official volume of the Movement, La Scuola Empatica, with the first one hundred adherents also defined Empathic Masters, was published in Italy and in Italian by the publisher Ladolfi, established in Novara. The volume are also published the main movement proposals “to combat the stagnation of hypertrophic contemporary individualism”. The same were published months later on the Italian literary magazine “Riscontri”. In the volume – dedicated to Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, Alessandro Serpieri and Remo Bodei, considered “infinita luce” (In English: “Infinite light”) – the Italian poet Giampiero Neri explains how the movement developed and asked to “all the people having the same principles, to join them”. The poet Vivian Lamarque invited all artists to “trace their own centimeter” affirming that they are “little voices / for a great choir”. The Italian poet Elio Pecora interrogated the readers asking whether “empathy” is really a gift only belonging to the human beings, explaining, immediately afterwards, that in his experience animals have always been very empathic to him much more than humans and in particolar than poets.
The Italian Television 7 Gold invited Menotti Lerro to explain the importance of the Movement in particular in that difficult Pandemic period. In 2021, in occasion of the European Heritage Days, the Soprintendenza of Salerno e Avellino stressed how the Empathic School was the third School started in the Province of Salerno. The previous two were the Eleatic School and Schola Medica Salernitana. According to the Soprintendenza of Salerno and Avellino the union of these three schools determined the birth of a Macro Cultural Triangle of the Salerno Province. In relation to the latter topic, literary critic Francesco D’Episcopo of Federico II University of Naples, wrote an article titled “Scuola Eleatica, Scuola Medica, Scuola Empatica: il triangolo culturale del territorio salernitano, da Parmenide a Lerro” (In English: “Eleatic School, Medical School, Empathic School: the cultural triangle of the Salerno area, from Parmenides to Lerro“). The 10th of August, Salento Cilento “The Poetry Village” put on the wall of its square the first Cultural Pyramid of Cilento. In 2022 the Cilento International Poetry Prize, flagship of the Movement, got financed by Ministero della Cultura for 140.500 EURO.
In 2025 a visual art exhibition of the Movement was curated by Lino Vairetti, artist and musician, and involved a group of artists from different cities, with the aim of creating an emotionally engaging experience.
In 2025 the Anthology about Italian Empathic Poets was published by Genesi, edited by Menotti Lerro: Poeti Empatici Italiani, un incontro tra letteratura e emozione, Università di Salerno, 2025 – YouTube
Pre-Empathism period: (2000-2020)
Bibliography:
“New Manifesto of Arts” (ClanDestino, 2019/Zona, 2020); La Scuola Empatica (Ladolfi, 2020); “La Scuola Empatica” (“Speciale” in the Magazine “Riscontri”, 2022); The Empathic Movement (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023); Poeti Empatici Italiani (Genesi, 2025); L’Empatismo (Curcio, 2025).
See also:
- Greater Kashmir: New Manifesto of Arts: Empathism
- Book Riot: Literary Movements You’ve Never Heard Of
- Al-Araby: كاتب من العالم: مع مينوتّي ليرّو
- “Avvenire” by Maurizio Cucchi: (36) La modernita del movimento empatico. di Maurizio Cucchi
- Affaritaliani: Empatismo, dilaga in Italia un nuovo grande Movimento letterario-filosofico – Affaritaliani.it
- Affaritaliani: Nel mondo del cinismo assoluto sempre più aderenti al Movimento Empatico. La rivoluzione non sono i social, ma liberarsene – Affaritaliani.it
- Ministero della Cultura / Ministry of Italian Culture: Empatismo – Ministero della cultura
- Raiuno: MENOTTI LERRO E L’EMPATISMO CITATI A “CHECK UP” – RAIUNO – DALLA PROF. MARIA RITA PARSI, Marzo 2025 – YouTube
- Raitre: GIUBBE ROSSE: “NUOVO MANIFESTO SULLE ARTI” DI MENOTTI LERRO E ANTONELLO PELLICCIA. RAITRE, EMPATISMO
- Raidue: RAIDUE – Maria Rita Parsi parla del Movimento Empatico e del fondatore Menotti Lerro a Generazione Z – YouTube
- 7Gold: MENOTTI LERRO, OSPITE A 7 GOLD, RACCONTA “LA SCUOLA EMPATICA”: MOVIMENTO SORTO IN ITALIA NEL 2020
- Rete7: MENOTTI LERRO: DAL PRE-EMPATISMO ALL’EMPATISMO (2000-2025). VITO SANSONE, ADRIANO PIANO RETE 7 2025
